During the Spaceshuttle sts-118 launch i was trying to duplicate the view of the mission control center's main screen in Orbitron. On a Forum i was told, the GEO Sats you can see there were the tdrss sats. So i made a file with recent tle of tdrss, space shuttle and ISS. Unfortunately, none of the tdrss satellites in Orbitrons view matched the Satellite shown on MCC's main screen. After some investigation, i found three possible reasons for that:
1: my tle Data is extremely inaccurate. (which is not likely for GEO Satellites)
2: The Satellite is not a member of the tdrss constellation.
3: The MMC Main screen doesn't show its ground related view but its ISS related view. I'm not good at maths but might it be bossible that the Iss can be seen from tdrss Satellites on more than 50 percent of its possible ground locations? This would mean that the visibility circle in the view would not show, where tdrss can look, but where it can't look. In this case tdrs 1, 4 and 10 would be possible candidates for what MCC Main screen displayed. The satellite would be somewhere over Bahia maybe, and moving northwards as you can see comparing 1st and 3rd img below. Unfortunately, there was no Satellite that was south of the equator AND moving north at launch time which would mean, that guy in the forum was wrong and reason #2 is true?!? This is confusing, can you help me?
tdrs 1,4,9 and 10 at launch time as simulated in Orbitron
MCC about 2 hours after launch
Update 2007/8/9 15:20 UTC:
The following image tells me that reason #3 is probably the case (Please tell me if you agree): You can see Satellite Logos "opposite" to the fields of view there.
